Community Lives: AI and the language community

AI is simultaneously seen as having a place in the language community, and as being a threat....

A disclosure: I’ve been married to an AI researcher for many years. My husband, it so happens, is a refugee from the so-called AI winter of the mid 1980s and early 1990s. This was a period in the UK when Sir James Lighthill published a scathing report on basic AI research methodologies. Coupled with a general pessimism amid the AI pantheon of big-name academics who were survivors of an even earlier wave of disenchantment with AI’s accomplishments, funding shrank and research hit the wall. Although new life would grow from fallow ground, the original impetus within the so-called AI community, effectively in abeyance, was halted and many highly talented people took their skills elsewhere....